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Hits, Pageviews and Other Lies
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About Me• Manager of Property Development
• Stat Guy at Gospelcom
• Not an “expert”
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A little secret...• I don’t really think hits, pageviews and other stats are worthless
• However, the context (or lack of context) we put them into makes them worthless.
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Big Picture Today• Help you understand your “traditional” stats a bit better.
• Start to explore new ways of collecting information about your impact.
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Motivation• Little real knowledge of end-users
• How can we treat them as more than stats?
• How can we do that without breaking the bank?
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“Traditional” Stat Packages• Optimized for
• Ads
• Sales
• Marketing Data
• What about Ministry?
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Definitions
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Hits
• A hit is any individual file moved from a web server to a client.
• Images, css files, javascript, html, video, audio, etc. are all hits.
• 1 web page + 10 images + 2 CSS files + 1 javascript file = 14 files = 14 “hits”
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Pageviews• A pageview is what you see in the browser.
• It’s all the hits put together
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Visits• A visit is comprised of one or more pageviews viewed by one person during one, uninterrupted time period.
• A.k.a. “sessions”
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Unique Visitor• A unique visitor is a person that has interacted with your site during one or more visits.
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Visitor Behavior• The actions a user takes as the result of visiting your website.
• Hard to measure.
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Traditional Stats• Two forms of data collection
• Javascript (Eg., Google Analytics)
• Log Files
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“Interpretation”
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Stat Analysis• 10 stat packages will give you 10 different interpretations from the same raw data.
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Hits• Mostly worthless when tracking visitors on your site.
• Useful for debugging errors and tracking downloads.
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Pageviews• Pageviews require lots of context to interpreted correctly.
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Pageviews: Frames• One frameset with 3 frames
• Will be counted as 4 page views by the server
• But the visitor sees it as a single page.
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Pageviews: Frames
Page
Page
Page
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Pageviews: Ajax• A page might have one or more components updated via Ajax.
• Often Ajax updates generate new “fragments” that are counted as single pageviews.
• Demo
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Pageviews: Spiders• Is it a person, or a spider?
• Traditional spiders: Google, Yahoo (noisy!), Live.com (MSN)
• 100s of smaller search engines
• RSS readers and aggregators
• DIY spiders
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Pageviews: “Window Shoppers”• Aka “Short Visits”
• If a visitor spends less than 5 seconds on your site, have you really impacted them?
• Engaged or “lost and confused?”
• “Information Hunting” vs. “Information Consuming”
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Pageviews: Visits• Changing the length of visits changes the number of visits.
• Industry “standard” length of a visit: 30 minutes
• Varies from tool to tool.
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Pageviews: Unique Visitors• Challenges to counting visitors
• Proxies
• Multiple computers/devices for each person.
• One household, many people.
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Data Collection• Log files: Busted by proxies.
• Javascript collection: Historically 10% of people have javascript disabled.
• Javascript collection: Non-traditional (e.g., cell phones) computers may or may not run the script.
• Over/under reporting due to network errors.
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Don’t Give Up!
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Don’t Give Up!• The web has better metrics than radio and television
• Treat them as estimates, not hard and fast numbers.
• Try your best to put stats in the right context.
• Augment with other information
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Stat Tools• Google Analytics is a great, free stats program.
• Feedburner.com is a good tool to track feeds.
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User Feedback
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Feedback• Gain a deeper understanding of your users by communicating with them.
• “Web 2.0” is giving us lots of new ways of connecting with our users.
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Email• Solicit email feedback
• Publish your contact information
• Contests
• Customer Service
• Use a ticket system
• Think about standards
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Blogosphere
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Blogosphere
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MyBlogLog
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SurveyMonkey
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SurveyGizmo
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Chat
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Social Networking Groups
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Social Networking Groups
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“Crowdsourcing”
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Physical Meetings
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Q&A
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